Nurses Protest Inflation, Venezuela, 2019
“The illusion of having a socialist or progressive president, in the long run, is as harmful as a fascist,” said a comrade during a discussion about the new Chilean president.
Gabriel Boric, a young socialist, 36 years old, was elected president of Chile at the end of 2021. His career as a student activist during the 2011 protests and later as a legislator gave him an image of a fighter for social causes. A large majority of young people went out to vote in the elections which gave him the victory.
“I will be president of all Chileans,” Boric said. He is promising to reform the health and pension system, raise the minimum wage and tax the super-rich more.
In his new cabinet of 24 ministers, 14 are women. Including the granddaughter of former socialist president Salvador Allende, assassinated in 1973. He gave her the position of minister of defense.
Legislator Camila Vallejo of the revisionist Communist Party of Chile, who was also a student leader, will be the government’s spokesperson.
The finance minister will be Mario Marcel, who was president of the Central Bank and worked for the World Bank. His nomination was applauded by the big Chilean capitalists.
Boric’s opponent was the fascist José Kast. His father, German by birth, was a soldier in World War II and a member of Hitler’s Nazi Party. Like father like son. Kast is a great admirer of the murderous fascist Augusto Pinochet, who together with the CIA (USA) overthrew and assassinated Salvador Allende and thousands of Chileans.
Kast congratulated Boric on his win. His party has a lot of power in parliament and the senate and will be part of the decisions of the new government.
The masses, especially the youth, are looking for an alternative to the ravages of capitalism. But trying to reform capitalism will not work.
A true communist revolution is needed, one that eliminates money and wage slavery. Boric and his cabinet will maintain the foundation of capitalism.
But the worst thing is that they politically disarm the masses. They take away the revolutionary communist vision of a new world: a communist world without racism, sexism, and exploitation. We will not achieve this by peaceful means.
Votes, ballot boxes and elections only legitimize the capitalist dictatorship. They are the silken glove of the capitalist democratic dictatorship that hides the iron fist of the capitalist fascist dictatorship, which they bring out when the masses seek more radical changes. This was the Pinochet’s attack in 1973.
Boric is not the first socialist in Latin America to come to power and want to reform capitalism. History has shown us that those experiences only keep the capitalist system alive. For example, Allende in Chile, the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Maduro in Venezuela, Jose Mujica in Uruguay. In all these places the working masses continue to be wage slaves and suffer the attacks of capitalism.
Changing our lives will not be done by voting and electing governments that fight for us.
We need to make the masses aware of true communist ideas and end capitalism through a communist revolution. For that we need thousands and millions organizing active communist collectives in the factories, schools and barracks.
Let’s start with ones and twos, reading and distributing our communist literature. These will mobilize the masses who will fight for and build the communist world that we so badly need. Building a new society will require the daily and constant action of millions.
Let’s defeat the illusion of a good capitalism, with the reality of building a communist world. Join ICWP
—Comrade in Los Angeles, USA
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